Read By: Yesenia Montilla

Mar 14, 2021

Yesenia Montilla on her selections:

It seems truly unbelievable that we are coming on a year of this pandemic and I have been like so many: just trying my hardest to survive. How I have survived is by slipping into poetry; my own and others. What deeply moves me about the four poems I chose are their honesty and their surprise, their tenacity and how they unravel a kind of ethos for us all within every line. The words have carried me through even though to me all four seem to work as elegies in a lot of ways; the elegy often times can be the beginning not the end. In this time, right now, I am craving beginning and cursing all the ends that we have suffered and maybe that is why the elegy calls to me. The four poems I am reading for you today are "temporary statement" by Sheila Maldonado; "Vita Nuova" by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado; "This Moment/Right Now" by Roberto Carlos Garcia and "Our Last Summer Together" by Cheryl Boyce Taylor. I hope they strike and move, create fire, or bring peace.

That’s What You Get by Sheila Maldonado

The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

[elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia

Mama Phife Represents by Cheryl Boyce Taylor

Intro and outro from "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

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Categories: Literary Read By

Tags: Yesenia Montilla

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